Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

The original German article is a bit too self-congratulatory for my taste. It's basically "we've got great, ethical journalists, a fantastic documentation department, and despite industry-leading defenses we were defrauded by him. Oh, did we mention how great we are?".

Sure, it's good you unveiled that. But in your article you're writing yourself how the first colleague to suspect something was stone-walled, had to fear for his job, got no support from superiors and investigated on his own money.

Maybe tone it down a bit.

View on HN

Exactly my thoughts. Also, I definitely do not like the self-righteous and pompous shaming they are now doing. If you read the original German article(s!) on spiegel.de, Claas Relotius is painted as this criminal mastermind, "one of the journalistic idols of his generation" (as a German, I have never heard of him), because only a nefarious genius could've been able to do something like this the "Spiegel" and circumvent all these "great" safeguard mechanisms. They cite internal emails by him, which is just bad taste. They are even trying to introduce the term "a Relotius" as a synonym for journalistic fraud into the German language, as in: "this was a classic Relotius". It's pathetic.

I cannot help getting the impression that the Spiegel employees perceive themselves as some kind of high priests of democracy, and what Relotius did was not only high treason, but blasphemy. Sure, responsible journalism is important for any healthy society, but a certain amount of fiction to make a story more coherent and enjoyable is - at least this is my perception - common practice. Additionally, as others have mentioned, calling the "Spiegel" a defender of high-quality journalism would've been true 20 years ago, but today is quite a stretch.

Relotius may have massively overdone it, but come on - the guy visited a high security prison in Kurdistan to interview someone, so at least try to be fair.

I don't necessarily disagree that Der Spiegel could be more humble in its tone (I can't tell, not being able to read its indepth explanation in the original German). But I don't believe that Relotius deserves any sympathy or leeway if these allegations are true. Fabrication is a far bigger transgression than "massively overdone" it. What does visiting a high security prison in Kurdistan have to do with anything?

You are right, he does not deserve sympathy, but he deserves fair treatment. I really did not like the "he did everything wrong, we are gods" tone of the Spiegel articles on the issue today, so my post above was a bit opinionated.

I meant the prison visit as an example that not everything was fabricated by him. It wasn't like he sat down on a desk in Hamburg and started dreaming out interviews, at least that is my understanding (which may be wrong, of course). For example, in one case, he did Skype interviews, received a list of images made by the other party, and then, instead of describing these images, just wrote about them as a smartphone video which may not exist in reality (the article wasn't sure). In another case, he closed an interview with a description of the person praying, which was a fabrication (he admitted that) or described background music (which I thought was really strange) that was not playing in reality. In other cases, he invented background information on people he described, or minor characters in the story. I would be very surprised if you weren't able to find misconduct like this (on a smaller scale, of course) in any journalist's life work.

I find it respectable that it was the Spiegel who pointed out the issue, but I am convinced that ridiculing and publicly destroying Relotius like that was a mistake and will drive a lot of readers away.

I can only speak for myself, but as a relatively low-tier journalist, I can confidently say I've never fabricated anything in my reporting. I may have made errors (misspelling names/titles/etc), or ill-informed judgments (thinking someone was a better expert/source than they were). But making something up requires crossing a clear line beyond incompetence. And I would never trust the journalistic output of anyone who was found to have made up anything. Because the process of journalism is ultimately about complete trust -- no matter how many editors/fact-checkers you have, it all comes down to what the reporters themselves say they have witnessed/heard. It's already common enough to misobserve something, it's just as easy to lie about something that only you were "there" to see/her -- thus, the need to make fabrication (and plagiarism, which can be seen as a subset of fabrication) so taboo. And any reporter who justifies breaking this taboo has most certainly justified breaking rules in grayer situations -- e.g. I've never known of a fabricator to have fabricated just once. Once they get away with it the first time, what's the reason to ever stop?

It's not about the "damage" to the end user, i.e. the reader. It's about the complete betrayal of professional ethics. To use a tech analogy, consider a user whose credit card number has been compromised. To the user, the damage is the same whether the info was compromised by the sysadmin's failure to prevent a trivial SQL injection attack, or if the sysadmin decided to use their admin privileges to access and share the info of that user to fuck with them. The former sysadmin can learn their lesson and be redeemed -- the latter case is someone I would most likely never trust with admin privileges.

I don't really understand your logic. I get that there's (sometimes) a social contract that journalists should produce factual work. However, I don't think that facts organize themselves into stories, without a degree of fabrication. Whether that fabrication is just a matter of ordering, emphasis, spin - or even elements made from new cloth seems a bit arbitrary to me.

Maybe you need to reconsider your personal sense of ethics. This strikes me as a staunchly immoral, or at least amoral, view.

As I see it, factual questions are inherently amoral. My moral position would be that nobody should read the news. I suspect this would vastly improve public understanding of current events.

Maybe you’re understanding “fabrication” for its meaning in manufacturing — e.g. fabricating a computer chip. In the journalism context, “fabrication” is used to mean, “making up facts/falsehoods”.

I do agree that the way someone can spin a story can be just as misleading and dishonest and wholesale making up facts. The practical matter is that it’s much easier to know that someone made up certain facts maliciously. Whereas whether something is maliciously spun vs. “telling it as it is” is harder to define.

But if a journalist is capable of malice in the former, they most certainly do the latter.

I'm broadly skeptical of the possibility, even given a great deal of talent and integrity, of accurately and objectively reporting the events of a given day with the paucity of lead time that journalists work with. Historians take years to develop a balanced understanding of a given event. Journalists must do so in twenty minutes, after a morning coffee.

When you compound that with journalist's traditional role as the mouthpieces of various political and state organs, their own personal biases, career interests, and organized media management strategies - well, it's really a testament to the good faith that reporters bring to the table that the news cycle is even within spitting distance of the facts.

I don't think malice is the problem. I think the news, as an institution, was never intended to accurately report the events, is structurally incapable of doing so, and so, shouldn't be expected to. Hysterics over a reporter 'making stuff up' is more a defensive thing on the part of journalists, since the foundational conceit of the whole profession, and its defining contradiction, is between their obvious political role, and their equally obvious reliance on being perceived as fact-oriented.

I mean, this is Der Spiegel. It's hardly great journalism. Outsiders shouldn't take this kind of hand-wringing too seriously.

The Spiegel has a lot to explain, and blaming it on Relotius alone is pathetic. However,

> It wasn't like he sat down on a desk in Hamburg and started dreaming out interviews,

Seems that he sat in Fergus Falls and started dreaming out interviews.

https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...

>a certain amount of fiction to make a story more coherent and enjoyable is - at least this is my perception - common practice

For a serious newspaper, new magazine, TV news show, etc. that's purporting to report a news story absolutely not. For example, the Boston Globe has suspended or fired columnists over the years who were found to have fabricated some facts in their columns.

That said, the context does matter. Certainly there's no shortage of books based on some experience of the author's that merge characters and otherwise make changes to improve the narrative flow. But these aren't presented as reporting.

After reading the recent post on Medium by two Americans who tried to expose Relotius last year [1] I have to say that my formulation "may have massively overdone it" above may have been a massive understatement.

[1] https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...

I couldn't agree more. During daytime in Germany they had the top three slots on their front page covered with stories about Relotius. "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste" taken by heart.

I only read half of the top story which has more than 6500 words. Most of it is written in a style as if it was breaking news about Relotius and not about DER SPIEGEL. They are almost self-congratulatory that they caught a fraudster.

Where there is a hint of self-criticism they don't fail to shrug it off with lame excuses:

> DER SPIEGEL will appoint a commission [...] to avoid that this will happen again. It cannot be avoided, even with the best of intentions. Journalism is, like everything else, to borrow a word from Heinrich von Kleist, subject to the "frailness of the world". And the human being who is engaged in journalism will always be and remain fallible. [1]

Yes, the "frailness of the world" is to blame. Got it.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/fall-claas-relotiu...

> DER SPIEGEL wird eine Kommission berufen [...] um Wiederholungsfälle zu vermeiden. Ausschließen lassen sie sich, auch bei bestem Willen, nicht. Der Journalismus unterliegt, wie alles, um ein Wort von Heinrich von Kleist zu leihen, der "Gebrechlichkeit der Welt". Und auch der Mensch, der Journalismus treibt, wird immer fehlbar sein und bleiben.

My interpretation is that the Spiegel chiefs want to make an example out of Relotius, to send a message to other journalists, that they must stick to the facts, or they will suffer the same fate. I don't think Class Relotius will be writing for any serious magazines or newspapers in the coming years. He may leave journalism and find another use for his talent as a writer. How can a newspaper or magazine ensure the veracity of its writers? Losing your career if you are found to lie seems like a good strategy.

> Yes, the "frailness of the world" is to blame. Got it.

People are flawed. Der Spiegel could send pairs on every assignment, but the problem would still exist. What do you suggest they should do to prevent this happening in future?

A single fabricated story that slips thorough can be a people are flawed problem. 60 stories from a fraudster, discovered by a colleague who investigated on his own money, got no support from superiors and had to fear for his job. That, is an organizational problem.

> What do you suggest they should do to prevent this happening in future?

First step would be to admit that they have an institutional problem. Blaming a single individual and the "frailness of the world" is not a step in the right direction to prevent this from happening in the future.

It seems they could have handled the doubts of Juan Moreno better. That is an institutional problem that can be improved upon.

Re. Class Relotius: It would be meaningless if der Spiegel were to print "we have an institutional problem, and we will fix it" without identifying what the problem and remedy is. A single bad actor falsifying stories, who is then almost-immediately fired and publically shamed by dem Spiegel, who then start an investigation, whose results will be made public, isn't indicative of any larger organizantional problems. I'm not aware of any way they can stop this happening. They have a team of fact-checkers, but there is only so much they can do. If there is an obvious solution, then criticism of the Spiegel's handling of the situation is warranted. Otherwise not.

As a German I have to say that Spiegel and spiegel.de aren't good journalism outlets and haven't been since many years ago. If I want well made journalism with actual investigative activities I'll resort to sueddeutsche.de, correctiv.org or nzz.ch.

Remember the Schulz-train "phenomenon" suddenly emerging last year? I stumbled upon it the first on spon and I am convinced they basically just invented it. And I am saying that as somebody voting for SPD.

Since I am trying to not let my German become too rusty, what would you recommend as a German news source that is somewhat free of a political agenda, so not leaning to the right or to the left too much?

Ideally just news, or news in context but no unbalanced editorials, opinion pieces or political or social agenda. It is the last one I am struggling with finding.

Also no cheap drama, preferably being positive in general.

No popular science, too.

Not shallow.

Telepolis: https://www.heise.de/tp/

Also, the list above lacks the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) as a source for high-quality journalism (politically, I would describe the FAZ as open-minded conservative.)

Haha! Telepolis is an extremely left-wing niche online site, with a certain leaning towards conspiracy theories.

It's the first time I've actually seen them included in any list of reputable media.

That's ridiculous. Telepolis is tin-foil, crackpot conspiracy-mongering. It being anywhere close in quality to reputable news sources is laughable. It's so far off the mark, I wouldn't even know where to put it on the traditional left/right scale. The "incoherent"<->"this is satire, right?" scale is its natural habitat.

I like reading Telepolis for just that: willingness to question mainstream consensus. Sometimes they do swerve wildly into crackpot territory. Some authors on there I just don't read because they've written shit in the past.

Telepolis is somewhat interesting to read, but it's full of agendas.

Read the DPA newsticker if you really just want "Merkel said X", "Train accident in Y", etc.

Spiegel, ZEIT, sueddeutsche, Tagesschau, and FAZ are the large, reputable, online publishers. If you want to watch, tagesthemen is I believe among the best-produced daily news in both German and English language.

Spiegel (the magazine) is distinct from Spiegel Online, and is only available for paying customers. Do read through one–I'm sure there's a free trial or a pdf you can find somewhere. It's mostly medium-length and some long-form, deeply reported stories, current events none-withstanding.

All of these are essentially mainstream, politically, with FAZ tending centre-right, tagesschau going to great length to appear neutral, and the rest being centre-left, somewhere right of The Guardian, left of The Economist.

Spiegel, ZEIT and Süddeutsche, especially their online editions aren't good recommendations for someone asking for news free of political agenda. During the last decade they have become very left-leaning, which is a sad development. I occasionally pick up a print copy of Zeit and Spiegel and these seem to be fine, but e.g. Der Spiegel also put Trump decapitating the Statue of Liberty on their cover (just inappropriate). I've never understood the good reputation of Süddeutsche, they are just doing very shallow reporting.

FAZ und NZZ are mostly neutral, slightly conservative (but not in the US sense). I'd recommend them.

I’d recommend faz.net (from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). It’s not completely free of political agenda but IMHO it’s a lot better than Spiegel.de.

I'd recommend the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ).

dw - Deutsche Welle. "Germqn Broadcast". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle

A broadcast service for promoting the language and culture to an international audience. A bit like "Voice of America". DW is financed by public funds that was allocated on the state level (ARD).

The have offerings such as a "slowly spoken news with transcript" podcast, in German language.

https://www.dw.com/de/deutsch-lernen/deutsch-aktuell/s-2146

The Schulzzug was invented on Reddit.

It certainly reads that way. But please, let them indulge in their fifteen minutes of self-righteousness: if that's what it takes to avoid a coverup, it is a very small price to pay.

I don't think they're even half aware of the awful consequences this will have. "Reichsbürger" and assorted "fake news" enthusiasts basically have been handed all they need from here on out -- like pouring some kind of synthetic super fuel on a fire we weren't able to deal with as is.

If a magazine disclosing it was fooled by one of its journalists makes anyone believe they live in the year 1935 and the illuminati are coming for their strategic tin-foil reserves then it's still not the media's fault.

I know. Dropping fuel on a fire and starting a fire are two different things, but it's fuel on that fire nonetheless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com